Series 1 not downloading data

Yesterday, TiVo completed the call successfully on its own. For a week prior to that, I was babysitting it, and getting it to complete after 3 or 4 attempts (which yielded both "Service Unavailable" and "Call Interrupted"). I'm not convinced that the problem is fixed, but it does seem to be getting better.

Others who have said they ran out of program data - has yours completed recently, either on its own or by manually trying over and over again?

Update: My Series 1 Sony has been making about 50% of it's calls successfully. Enough calls are being completed to keep the guide date updated. A problem still exists as 50% of the calls are still failing.

Interesting -- I had actually moved back from a turbonet attachment to dialup phonecalls because I was getting repeated failures more or less as above when connecting via my network. With my network connection, it was (suddenly, after years of success) rare to actually COMPLETE the call 2 days in a row, and my TiVo would begin to complain about running out of Guide Data. However, while dialup phonecalls would still occasionally drop, they would "never" fail more than 2 days in a row, and my TiVo would stay happy.

I'll bet you can see where this is going...

However, today after reading this post I checked, and I'd failed on dialup 3 days in a row. So I forced a call, which again failed--like yours, during an HTTP transfer. So I forced yet another call--which this time succeeded.

Coincidence? Don't know...

I guess the next thing to try is to go back to a network connection and see if that is any more or less "stable".

I still wonder if this is a situation where, from time to time, the TiVo service is getting overwhelmed and is "load-shedding" by dropping or refusing connections...

Worked again today. This is the second (at least) straight call it has made by itself just like the good old days.

Is it really fixed? Don't know but it looks like it for now anyway.

Did the TiVo crew fix this under the radar? Or did something just get out of whack and then back "in whack" by itself? We'll probably never know, but if is really is fixed, let me give the company a big

When I checked this evening it had locked up during the connecting stage and I had to pull the plug for a minute and plug it back in. I did not force a call as I am trying to see if it will still dial in by itself.

This is what I've been encountering with a Series 1 since early December:
Automatic connections don't work at all.
Test Calls either work or show "Service Not Available"
"Make Daily Call Now" may result in:
Service Unavailable, OR It makes the connection, starts downloading, and fails with "Call Interrupted".
Successive CALL NOWs are cumulative! That is, if it gets to the downloading stage, the next time you call it picks up the download from where it left off. Eventually, it gets to the end and the update has worked.

This is a real PITA. I see here and on other forums that this is a problem at tivo that they don't acknowledge. I'll call tomorrow morning and see what kind of runaround I get.

Called, got real person on phone within one minute. Described problem - "No, we're not aware of anything like that". Gave me a case #, then told me to change the modem speed (entering a special dial prefix) and test it. I did that, the result was that it couldn't even dial properly.

Called them back and got a different person. The first one hadn't even recorded the symptoms, just entering the problem as a routine "can't connect". This tech (Chris), however, listened carefully, believed me that other people were having the same problem over the same time frame, took adequate time to record the problem properly, and promised to escalate it. Couldn't ask for more!

The first tech knew nothing about the 'suggestions' problem, but this one not only knew about it, he also said that they'd received a notice that it would be fixed 'soon'.

Since this morning, I've done a 'call now' twice. It worked with no problems both times. Maybe because there's so little new data to download - only a couple of hours worth of guide info.